e Beaver interviews the LSESU Floorball Society Captain

by NOAH POLL, illustrated by FAY QIAN, and image by RAYYAN FURREEDUN

are also many di erent ability levels. Floorball is a sport where we have the recreational team and the competitive team play together, but now we’re trying to explore whether we should do separate sessions or not, especially as we get closer to competition season.

Noah: What social activities have you organized so far?

Ella: We go to Wetherspoons a er almost every training session. Because the Spoons sta recognizes us from going so much, they ask us, “oh, do you want us to save a table for you?” Other than that, we organize socials at Sway around once every 3 weeks. Because oorball has quite a lot of alumni from LSE, and they are busy on weekdays, our Sway socials aren’t as frequent as other clubs.

Noah: How about your favorite memory from being on the oorball team?

Ella Cheong, president of the LSESU Floorball Society, spoke with me about what oorball is, insights she has gained from competing in a co-ed sport and team dynamics. In the interview, she touched upon her favorite memory, the diversity of the team and what their plans are for Lent Term.

Noah: Could you introduce yourself, what you do, what oorball is, and what you’ve done this year so far?

Ella: Floorball is ice hockey without the ice. e sport is mostly popular in Eastern Europe, Finland, Sweden, and Singapore. Our oorball cohort used to be around 60% Eastern European and 40% Singaporean. e year 3 batch is the last batch of pre-Brexit players, so we used to have a lot more Eastern Europeans. Now, because of the change in the student population, we are more like a Singaporean club. e good thing is that this year, we’ve gotten a lot more local players to join us, especially people with former ice hockey or hockey backgrounds. I have been the oorball captain since November of last year. e LSE team plays 5v5 games on the court in the Marshall Building. e unique thing about oorball compared to other sports is we have quite a lot of external players that come in. is is because originally, our team used to be too small to play by ourselves in a league. Slowly, our external member population has grown, with people from Imperial, UCL, and King’s joining us.

Noah: at’s cool. Building o of that, you mentioned how membership is reliant on students from di erent universities to join. How has that impacted team culture? Does it make it harder to bond and be on campus with each other?

Ella: e team that we play with, London United, wasn’t meant to be an LSE focused team at rst, because last year it was LSE and Imperial. But, this year, since we have the Marshall Court, the dynamics of the team kind of changed and the LSE team was the main team in charge. is is just because we’re the team that always interacts with the SU, we’re the team that always organizes socials at Sway.

Because of that, the team culture shi ed to more of an LSE majority. Only 20% of a society’s members can come from external sources. As a result, some people had to leave the club. It was a di cult change to navigate at rst, but I think that, currently, where our club stands makes me really happy. We have a lot more members than last year because of the branding that we’ve done, and a lot of people just got to know us because our team won the championship last year at Oxford.

Currently, we have 50 members, compared to last year when we only had around 20. As of now, the main challenge we face is that we have a lot of people. Sessions have been quite hard to conduct because obviously with so many people, there

Ella: A er we had our University League win last year, we were just walking around Oxford looking for a pub that could accommodate all of us. In the end, nobody could take us, so we just went to this random restaurant. ey could tell that we all wanted to party, so they kept approaching our team and o ering alcohol. We kept saying yes, but then the bill came and we were like, “oh my gosh, can we claim club funds for this?” It was really fun because we didn’t go into the season expecting a lot. As a rst-year captain, I didn’t really know what to expect. It was hard to gauge the ability of the team, so going into the season we weren’t expecting a championship win or anything. A er playing a few matches we were like, ‘hey, maybe we have this in the bag’.

Noah: I’m glad to hear that! Looking forward, what are you most excited about for the rest of the year?

Ella: is year we have so many players that we have decided to send two teams to the competition. We have competitions that I’m looking forward to as we play until March. We’re looking forward to more socials. We’re going to do elections in Lent term, so I’m trying to see who’s going to run for captain and how exactly to pass the position down.

Noah: at’s all I have, but do you have anything speci c that you’d like to add, or something that I missed?

Ella: We play a mixed gender sport, and there aren’t any regulations for how many girls have to be on a team. Last year we only had 3 girls, and starting out, I was quite scared. It’s a contact sport and it can get really rough, because you can shove people. I’m trying to get more girls on the team. Floorball is meant to be a bit more chill because we don’t have padding like ice hockey, we don’t move as quickly. Diversity in the sport is important for me. As a girl, when I nervous about guys being harsher, like if you mess up, they won’t be afraid to tell it to your face. I think in the teams I was in previously, people are a lot more PC and gentle with you. At the start when I joined was on the edge about that. But, I think it’s a really good experience to play the sport with guys because being upfront about mistakes helps a lot with how fast you improve. It improves the team dynamic as well – there’s no underhandedness.

Be it by scrolling on social media, reading articles or seeing video clips of protests online, I have been overwhelmed by the turmoil in Iran and how little I can do to be helpful in any way. us, I decided to interview Arya for this Flipside interview, a 3rd year BA History student at LSE and the LGBTQ+ o cer at the LSESU.

Arya is currently on a gap year. Being an Iranian citizen and of Iranian descent, these protests are personally signi cant to him. He has been campaigning both at LSE and online - in podcasts, articles and protests- for Iranian Women.

Iran is a long standing battleground for human rights. e death of Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini is what sparked the current wave of protests. Mhasa Amini died a er being arrested by Iran’s morality policy for breach of the country’s strict compulsory hijab laws. Amini, who was only 22 years old when she died in the custody of the police, has become the symbol of Iranian women’s ght for freedom.

Protests in Iran have taken place for over 100 years now and they have repeatedly zzled out a er brutal crackdowns from the government. Arya points out how this time is di erent: “I’ve never seen a group of people rally together so fast and so uni ed like Iranians during this time, even the most non-political people I’ve ever seen have started posting and talking about it.” Despite Facebook, Twitter and various other social media being banned in Iran and the lack of onsite reporting, Iranians are leveraging the power of the internet to amplify their voices and gather mass support. “It makes you believe in humanity,” Arya expressed.

When asked about the extent to which Arya believes that social media is in uential in the political lens, he immediately exclaimed, “We are half the revolution”, explaining how each one of us can enable the movement by a click of a nger. “I always tell people, ‘Just post about Iran.’ e internet is the strongest thing ever. Compared to the West it is even more so in the Middle East, with the digital revolution, your phone is the most powerful activist tool.” e use of social media as a tool has also emerged as an undisputed one for Iranians as a way to communicate and connect with the world around them.

Arya explained how fundraising, despite the economic crisis in Iran, is not a feasible option mainly due to the di culty in transferring money to Iran. He elaborated that primarily, the protests are revolving around human rights and not the dooming economic crisis hence the best thing an average person can do to support the movement is repost on social media. “ e regime is very powerful and very willing. ey have dealt with international pressure and sanctions for years and they don’t care. So, awareness really is the biggest thing.” Arya argued that amplifying the voices of Iranians leads them to feel validated and heard by the international community. “Honestly, the best thing you can do is to be aware and to just repost.” Arya has been sharing social media posts, reporting on events, writing blogs, and doing podcasts since the beginning of the protest.

“ A threat to women’s rights is a threat to human rights everywhere. And injustice in Iran is injustice everywhere.’ He expressed. We want to advocate for a better future for all of us, don’t leave anyone behind.”

According to Arya, social media’s power - especially Instagram - is re ected in the billboards in Times Square, the Time Magazine declaring Iranian women to be the heroes of 2022, the support at Paris Fashion Week with Designer Mike Amiri carrying the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” or even Shervin Hajipour’s “Baraye” winning the grammy award. He pointed out that the UN expelling Iran from the women’s commission and the European Union voting to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organisation are both the result of social media awareness. He explained that Iran becoming the rst country to ever be expelled is “embarrassing, but it was necessary, it is absolutely a win for Iranian Women.”

We then go on to talk about the role of the community in the Iranian movement and the plurality of people coming together in Iran. e LGBTQ+ community in Iran has been ghting for many decades now against the conservative regime and has repeatedly been met with violence and oppression. “ ey are not the voice of the revolution, but they are ghting very, very hard, alongside them.” He noted that women have always been very integral to all the protests, especially in 2009. On top of that, Kurdish, LGBTQ Iranians and Salukis have been ghting every single day for 43 years, and are now joining hands with the entire Iranian community. is acknowledgement and recognition of long suppressed minority groups and ethnicities have allowed for the uni cation of Iran. An Iran with di erent religions, sexualities, and ethnicities coming together for a single cause - the rights of Iranian women.

Arya has also taken on some projects on a personal level, such as his podcast episode “What does resilience look like for Iranian women” with UnTextbooked. Arya interviewed Dr. Janet Afary, a professor from the University of California Santa Barbara about her book Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. e book surveys the queer and feminist histories of Iran in the late 1700s. e podcast talks about how Iranian women have been ghting ceaselessly, how they were able to nd agency in their household through their marriage patterns and their methods of ghting which lead to certain victories.

“ e book is really valuable and helps you understand the nuances of Iranian society.” Arya explained, “Learning about how the 1979 revolution happened has allowed me to better grasp what can be done to make the 2022 revolutions successful and how the regime is living on borrowed time.” Arya has also attended various protests in London, Paris, New York etc.

Talking about the role of LSE and its support for students and sta regarding the Iranian protests, Arya said, “I want 100% support, like the war in Ukraine. I appreciate LSE supporting Ukrainian students and anyone who’s a ected by the war in Ukraine. However, I don’t believe in taking away support from one group to support another group. I do think LSE needs to step up its support for Iranian students the way it has for other students. I don’t think it’s fair.”

Arya, being the LGBTQ+ o cer at the SU, noted that he enjoys his time working as a group of people trying to do their best for the students. He also pointed out that when the SU issued the statement about Iran, all the societies followed through, which proved to be recognition and support towards the cause. He further talked about the role of LSE as an academic institution “It has to take care of its students, and its sta ey don’t seem committed to Iranian students. I want more mental health support. I also want to see LSE do better for scholars.”

He elaborated by bringing up the need for inclusion of Iranians in the “Scholars at Risk Programme”, which allows scholars at risk in their home country to be hosted by LSE for a period of two years. “I want Iranians to be able to get their visa sponsored in the UK and be able to seek asylum in the UK, as well as be funded and have a job at LSE without the fear of the government coming a er them.” Arya expressed the importance of this step and he is actively working on the inclusion of Iranian scholars in the scheme. “I am going to try to be in the room every time so as to make this happen. It is the most important thing LSE can do right now.”

He noted that these protests have helped him come closer to Persian culture and other fellow Iranians. “My Farsi is good, but it’s not great, and I began taking Farsi lessons again. I have a Persepolis statue on my nightstand. And I never would have done that before. I’ve been celebrating Yalda night. I’ve been reconnecting with my family.” Hearing this made me smile as it is also the little tiny ways in which the diaspora is rekindling, reuniting, carrying the heavy weight of ghting this brutal regime together. “If you were once disconnected from your culture, now’s the time.”